>>>Well, English makes perfect sense to me, but of course it's the only language I know. <g>
>>
>>Problem is that it makes too much sense, much more than one'd wish for. If you overheard that there was "some java in china"... which would it be? A piece of Javanese culture in the People's Republic, or some coffee in a porcelain vessel?
>>
>>You may check my ambiguity page (link in the signature), and I promise to refresh it next week, got a few additions.
>
>Yeah, I've looked at that page before. Interesting, but there is no ambiguity in other languages? There must be. But if your answer is "much less in other languages" then I wonder how over such a long period of time more ambiguity has not crept into those languages as it has in English. Perhaps because English was influenced by so many other languages. Language is a very interesting subject. Wish I had more time for it.

I think the main reason for the great number of ambiguous situations is that the words don't have forms - anything can become a verb, a noun, an adjective without changing at all. In pretty much any other language you add a suffix to make one kind of word from another. Also the lack of word forms within the same word - in most of the other languages the word changes as it goes through different situations, or at least the article changes. So quite often there is no way to distinguish different usages of the same word, except by context - and when the context is made out of other ambiguous words, you get what you get.

The other cause is the habit of overloading the existing words with new meanings. New notion comes up, it seldom merits a new word, it just gets in the line as yet another meaning of some overused word.

> Have you ever listened to "My Word" on the BBC? They are all reruns since it went off the air a number of years ago, but it's still a great show.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, no. It'd probably spoil me :).